West Africa's Mobile Money Interoperability Switch Goes Live, Three Years Late

The switch went live at 2 a.m. on Saturday with almost no announcement, which is generally the sign of a payments project that expects trouble. By Monday afternoon it had cleared 1.4 million transactions and the operators were willing to talk about it.

The system connects wallets from six mobile money operators across four West African countries, allowing a direct transfer where previously a user in Abidjan sending to a relative in Accra would have gone through an agent, a cash leg, and a fee stack that routinely exceeded 8% of the transfer value. Interchange under the new scheme is capped at 0.9%, set by the participating central banks.

"The technical build took fourteen months," said one central bank official who worked on the project and asked not to be named discussing internal timelines. "The other twenty-two months were four regulators and six commercial parties agreeing on who eats the settlement risk at 3 a.m. on a Sunday. That is the actual project. It always is."

Volume is the test now. Interoperability schemes elsewhere have gone live and then sat unused because the consumer experience was worse than the informal alternative. Early signs are encouraging — average transfer size in the first weekend was $34, suggesting genuine remittance traffic rather than testing — but the agents who have been intermediating this flow for a decade are not going to concede it quietly.